FCC Suffered DDoS Attack at Comment System

During his show, John Oliver encouraged viewers to flood Federal Communications Commission site with comments, and it seems that the result was overwhelming. However, the agency itself claims that it suffered DDoS attacks.

Indeed, it is known that the FCC’s comment system went down after Oliver’s show, with the agency claiming that the problem resulted from the denial-of-service attacks rather than volume of calls.

Several years ago, Oliver’s call for tough “net neutrality” rules to prevent ISPs from slowing traffic of rivals or favoring their own products or clients appeared very fruitful, resulting in a record 4m comments at the FCC website. Now the new Republican FCC chairman has pledged to take a “weed whacker” to those rules. Oliver decided to join the fray once more and urged people to comment. As a result, the FCC’s CIO issued a statement saying that the agency was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) right after Oliver’s show. The FCC is sure that it detected deliberate attempts by external actors to send a high amount of traffic to its commercial cloud host of its comment system. As a result, the FCC’s servers were tied up and prevented from responding to users trying to leave comments.

However, the campaign director for Internet activist group Fight for the Future called for an inquiry into the incident, saying that the FCC should immediately release their logs to an independent security analyst to let them find out what in fact happened. She claims that the public deserves to know it, and the agency has a responsibility to maintain a functioning online service able to receive feedback from the public.